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Culture-specific items (CSIs) abound in languages. Sometimes these items are peculiar to one culture and sometimes they may be shared across several cultures. Every translator encounters a variety of CSIs in different texts ​​and may face difficulties in translating them, particularly in literary translation (e.g. children’s literature). To overcome the problem of finding the right equivalent, the translator has to rely on different strategies. This study investigates the strategies used to render CSIs in two Persian translations of Roald Dahl’s “Charlie and Chocolate Factory”, following Newmark’s (1988) model (which includes categories such as cultural equivalent , transference , functional equivalent , through-translation , etc.). The study also compares the two translations, inspecting and explaining the strategies used in each one to translate the CSIs observed. Based on the data analysis and the results of the study, the most widely used strategies was “cultural equivalent”, followed by “through-translation” and “recognized translation.”

The importance of sport as a social, psychological, and cultural agenda in today’s world can by no means be denied. This is, as a rule, reflected in all its aspects through the language of media. The present descriptive study has thus tried to investigate how the language of sports media shape sport consumers such as coaches, players, the audience, and sporting officials at large. For this purpose, fifty soccer games were investigated during an eight-month period. The data collected from TV interviews, newspaper reports, and a sporting talk show called Navad (i.e. 90) were transcribed and analyzed with a CDA perspective in view, for the coaches, players, the audience, and officials. As a result, twelve categories were extracted based on the coaches’ reactions to their failure, from which the most salient was referees’ judgments. A close look at these categories reveal a circular relationship among sports media, coaches’ reactions to their failure or triumph, the audience interpretation of their favorite teams, and macro decisions of the officials in this field. The findings of this study can contribute to the development of a better and more appropriate environment among the four mentioned groups involved in soccer game in Iran.

Course books play a crucial role in educational process and are believed to be the pivotal ingredient of language teaching. Every new textbook needs to be analyzed in order to reach its best. Hence this study aims to analyze three Iranian English course books to reveal how various cultures are shown via the course books characters’ race, nationality, gender, and intercultural communications. The inspection of the course books revealed unequal cultural representations with the dominance of white and male characters. Furthermore, regarding the intercultural interactions, most examples included conversations among Iranians in a superficial level of cultural engagement. It was also found that males’ roles are more highlighted throughout the series. Hence, in some cases, the leading ideology floating in this series is prototyping the Iranian-Islamic culture and values by means of English. Overall, this series seemed to suffer from biased embedded ideologies in terms of presenting cultures, races and genders. The findings of this study are of great help for language teachers, language learners, textbook developers, and curriculum developers to adopt an international position toward education.

The present mixed-method study sought to investigate the efficacy of using an interventionist dynamic assessment and specifically its formats namely the cake and the sandwich ones on learners’ grammatical English Tenses. In doing so, 45 advanced learners of English language at Iran Language Institute (ILI) in Shiraz, Iran were selected. They were randomly assigned to 3 groups, each including 15 participants. Two experimental groups namely the cake and the sandwich ones received the interventionist dynamic assessment test while the third group received a non-dynamic grammar test which was functioning as a control group. As the study utilized a sequential exploratory design (QUAN → qual) of mixed method approach (MMR), the quantitative part was carried out via a well-established grammar test and in the qualitative component, six informants (3 from the cake group and 3 from the sandwich group) were selected to be interviewed and their quotations were descriptively analyzed through a sociocultural perspective. The quantitative component of the study revealed the outperformance of the two experimental group over the control group. However, the two modes of delivering mediation in experimental groups had no statistically significant difference on the degree of the acquisition of grammatical English tenses by learners. The interview analysis of the negotiations also demonstrated positive viewpoints of learners about the two experimental groups. Merging the quantitative and qualitative analyses, the study found that interventionist dynamic assessment, in both modes, could have positive effects on learners’ ability to improve their acquisition of English tenses.

Studies on the generic structure of thesis and dissertation acknowledgments have resulted in some influential models such as Hyland’s (2004) and Al-Ali’s (2010) models. Few studies, if any, have investigated the generic structure of acknowledgments in books. Therefore, the present study was an attempt to find out whether the acknowledgments of books follow an organizational pattern. To this end, 200 books (100 written by native and 100 by non-native speakers of English) which included acknowledgements section, from a mass of 1000 books, were considered. The data were analyzed with reference to Hyland’s (2004) scheme. The results obtained from the analysis of the acknowledgments written by both native and non-native writers of English revealed that the overall structure of the acknowledgements section of the books follows an organizational pattern which is a combination of two models: Hyland’s (2004) scheme (all moves and steps), Al-Ali’s (2010) model (Praising and Thanking God Step and Signing off Move) and two new moves: Copyright Move and Commenting Move. The findings suggest that a full appreciation of this organizational pattern can help writers to enjoy this unique space for thanking all those who have contributed to completion of their work and academic identity formation.

Emotion and cognition are both considered influential factors in language learning. In this study, the role of "emotioncy" (which is a combination of emotion and frequency) in the cognitive load and sentence comprehension of a group of language learners was examined. Emotioncy includes emotions that are evoked by the senses. To this aim, 200 English as a foreign language (EFL) learners were asked to fill out the NASA Task Load Test, a sentence comprehension test, and an emotioncy scale. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was run to measure the construct validity of the emotioncy scale. Subsequently, Pearson Product-Moment correlation coefficient and structural equation modeling (SEM) were used to analyze the data. The results showed that emotioncy has a significantly negative and positive relationship with cognitive load and sentence comprehension, respectively (p